What You Need to Know About Jack
by Alicia Moonstoan
Summary: "I don't understand why he flinches away from me all the time," Jeff said to the Butcher. The creature stirred, the remains of one hand scribbled a note and passed it to him to read. "Haven't you ever seen what he draws in that notebook?" What You Need to Know About Jack. Alternately, "A Poorly written account of events from 1943 until 2012 from the perspective of an zombie Nazi"
1. Chapter 1

**AN:** This is for SuperKassu, who suggested that I might want to write Eyeless Jack's backstory. To this, I replied to myself, "of course I do, but they aren't going to like it." and then I remembered I don't really care whether you like it or not, as long as I feel good about it.

Fair warning though: there will be some gruesome things in here. This is not a very happy story.

P.S. I hope that I got the language translations right and the other bits of culture and details. I might have missed something, so let me know if I did.

 **EDIT:** Thanks to Kassu for pointing out that Russia didn't exist in 1943/44, and being confused about the time something was happening. I've clarified both issues.

* * *

 **What You Need to Know About Jack**

It was the winter of 1943, and the members of the Sixth Army infantry were doing their best not to think about how they were going to starve to death in the sub-zero temperatures of Stalingrad. It had been nearly 15 days since a Soviet counter-attack had cut off the Germans' escape route. Barely any food had gotten through via the airplanes that were supposed to be delivering it. Things were looking grim for the Sixth Army.

Sitting in a makeshift shelter that was half rubble and half trench were four men. Strictly speaking, they were not supposed to be sitting together, but all four of them had quietly bent the rules until their own morality allowed him to disobey their commanding officers.

They had built a little fire, and were taking it in turns to put their hands almost directly into the flames in the hopes of staving off frostbite. They had already given up on their feet. The youngest of them, a boy who had been two years too young when he joined the army, but didn't much care at the time, was already trying to decide the least traumatic way of removing his toes before ganggreen set in.

Let's call this boy Jack because by the time this story reaches present day, this is the only name he himself can remember.

Jack was, as previously mentioned, the youngest of the group, and the thinnest, but not the shortest. He had two inches on the next youngest, a man that he didn't particularly get along with, but who he put up with because they had mutual friends. He was probably the most intelligent of the bunch, though he spoke in the same course military slang and didn't ever offer opinions.

He was a good shot with a rifle, and he carried his own gun over his shoulder on a leather strap. He'd been picking off Soviets the whole day with that gun, when his fingers were warm enough to bend and he wasn't shivering too hard. He wasn't sure how many he'd hit. He had lost count.

Jack also had a letter, tucked on the inside of his clothing, right up against his skin. Despite the urgings of the other three men and the lack of flammable material, he hadn't thrown the letter onto the fire. He won't do it either, not until they're really freezing to death and possibly not even then. He's that kind of person.

The men in the trench were running out of time, though they didn't know it. In just over a half hour, an artillery shell would come screaming out of the sky, barely missing the edge of what used to be the second floor of a building, and snuffing out all four lives right there and then.

The boy we will call Jack was looking up when it happened, rubbing his hands together, trying not to think about how he was losing the feeling in his fingers. He had perhaps two seconds of warning: seeing the vague gray shape, registering what it was, and then throwing himself out of the way. He didn't even bother to cry out. There was no time to yell, to give warning.

So when the explosive hit, he wasn't killed by the immediate blast. Instead, he was thrown bodily, only feeling the sudden and remarkable warmth of the explosion behind him. Then his body made contact with a pile of jagged rubble and his neck cracked audibly.

A human has about 30 seconds after decapitation before real death sets in and they lose consciousness. What had happened to Jack was no different than decapitation in terms of consequences: his head was no longer receiving oxygen from the rest of his body.

In those last 30 seconds before death, he thought two things. The first was, "Well, it's a lot faster than freezing to death." the second, "I hope she doesn't miss me too much."

And the world turned off.

* * *

The boy called Jack sat up fast in his closet bedroom, pulling a breath into lungs still containing a small amount of blood. He coughed, bringing up some of it, and bent to spit it into a nearby bucket.

He had been dreaming again. He didn't sleep that much, but whenever he did, he had these dreams. It was always in nightmare flashes, colorful and vivid.

He shook off the thoughts and got up, not bothering to change clothes, not bothering to do more than pull on the bloody apron hanging from a peg in the wall. He stepped out of the closet and into the dim room beyond. He glanced at the calendar on the way by. It was 1963. He had been in the U.S. for just over 10 years.

There was a crate waiting for him on the low table in the middle of the room. Muffled noises rose up from it.

Jack took the wheeled cart from the side of the room, checked the knives with the palm of one hand. He checked the hooks on the ceiling, pulled the chains from the wall.

Then he picked up the crowbar and popped open the lid of the crate. The man inside it stopped struggling, looked up with wide-eyes. What he was seeing was an angular, handsome face with good bone structure, partially disguised by the bandages obscuring its eyes.

"Hello," Jack said, his English accented.

The man in the crate blinked, but didn't reply. He was tightly gagged.

Jack shrugged and leaned over the crate, checking the ankle restraints. He used a meat hook to attach the bindings to the chain and heaved on the other end of it. The man rose out of the crate by his ankles, twisting and screaming through his gag.

"Oh shut up," Jack grumbled to himself, practicing his English. He bent down and hooked the other end of the chain through the loop on the floor.

The man squealed at Jack selected and lifted one of the knives from the cart. He slid a bucket across the floor, positioning it below the swinging arms, then attached the wide sloping rim that he'd made himself to help catch the spills.

Jack stood up, placed a hand in the hair of the man hanging upside down, and pulled backwards, exposing the pulsing jugulars. The man's heart was beating itself to death. Jack licked his lips, detached hunger making him greedy. He considered taking some. Not much: just one glass. It was part of his share anyway. That was the agreement.

He set the blade of the knife against the man's neck.

"BOY," The Butcher called from the next room over. It had the kind of voice that deserved all capital letters. It boomed through the morgue, echoing off all the metal surfaces and scrubbed tiles.

Jack flinched, and the knife nicked the skin of the man's neck. A few drops of blood fell into the bucket beneath him.

"COME HERE, BOY."

Jack paused only a moment to steal a fingertip's worth of blood from the man's neck. He sucked it off his own index finger as he walked down the narrow hallway. He opened the door at the end briskly, with a short sharp one-two step that brought him inside and to attention in one go.

The Butcher wasn't so large. It was only slightly deformed, only making use of three or four extra limbs, not the ten or eleven it would make use of by the end of the century. Even so, it still looked vaguely insect-like.

Jack watched it carefully. It was one of the first things he was made to understand: the Butcher was an it, not a he or a she. It had decided long before that human was one thing that it wasn't. Like a lot of things he had experienced lately, this rubbed Jack the wrong way. In fact, everything rubbed Jack the wrong way. He learned to shut up about it. The Butcher is a harsh disciplinarian.

There was someone else at the table, across from the Butcher. They were completely obscured in cloth, so much so that he couldn't even tell what color their skin was.

"I see what you mean," the stranger said, "very human-like."

Jack was looking at the Butcher, but it was impossible to tell. The creature had fallen silent. Talking hurt it. It blinked golden cat-eyes and hummed.

"Delightful," the stranger said, and then its tone changed, "take off the apron."

It took Jack a long moment to decode the statement, and then he complied. He untied the apron and lifted it over his head. He was wearing a thin shirt underneath it, purely for comfort, but right then he knew it made his muscles stand out more than a little.

The stranger sat back, one gloved hand caressing its jaw. At least, Jack assumed that it was its jaw. It made a noise in its throat that Jack was all too familiar with: the groaning purr of someone who likes what they see. "Perhaps," It said, "I could borrow him, just for a couple hours."

Jack, understanding perfectly, looked at the Butcher. His mouth was pressed tightly closed, and if he had not had bandages over his eyes, they would have looked pleading.

The Butcher wouldn't look at him. It bent low over the table, writing its answer.

Jack broke one of his rules and spoke up. His voice was slow and careful, the English stumbled off his tongue, "May I finish with the work first?"

The stranger vocalized its delight, "He speaks, and such a sweet voice. Of course you may, darling,"

Jack glanced at the Butcher and received a nod of assent. He turned on his heel and went back down the hallway and into the first room. He carefully closed the door behind him, and only then allowed himself to start shaking.

The man was still hanging upside-down from the chain, looking a little less scared and a little more faint. All the blood had rushed to his head, which for Jack's purposes meant that some of it would be lost. More than a cup of it at least.

Jack composed himself and went to the man. He picked up the same knife as he used before and pressed it under the man's chin. The hanging man's eyes flicked to him, fear returning to them.

Jack's throat worked in a rough swallow. When he spoke, it was with his usual smooth voice, but it was tight and barely under control. His English didn't carry so much of an accent now that he was warming up. "You're the lucky one here," he told the man, "I'd much rather be you than me."

Jack moved his hand smoothly over the man's neck, leaning into it, putting his weight behind it. Under the knife, he felt ligaments snap and muscles rupture. Blood poured down with the approximate force of a firehose, spattering Jack's front with red.

Jack paused a few moments, waiting for the worst of the spray to subside, and then he took a cup from the cart and let the dripping blood fill it. He raised is to his lips and drank. It tasted like fear and pain and death, but he didn't care. He swallowed the last of it and put the cup down.

Jack left the body where it was, draining. He didn't change his clothes, but he ditched the apron. He walked back down the hallway, paused with his hand on the door to take a deep breath, then opened the door.

Jack had no illusions about what was about to happen to him. If the Butcher's personal identity was the first thing he was made to understand, the second was this: you do not say "No" to someone who is stronger than you.

After all, he deserved it, didn't he?

* * *

The thing that at some point in the future would be called Jack became aware with its mouth full of human flesh. It tasted fine, so he swallowed. He felt how his own stomach was distended, how full he felt.

Only then did he open his eyes.

He was crouched over the body of his friend. It was barely recognizable. Half of its head was caved in from the artillery blast. It was flayed open, brutally and unprofessionally. The ribs had been snapped off and lay scattered on both sides of the body. Between the broken stubs, blood was pooling in the purple-red cavern that had contained the man's internal organs only minutes before.

Jack looked down at his hands. He dropped the chunk of meat clasped in them and stared at the blood all over him. He felt for his stomach, felt the way it bulged slightly, and he understood.

Jack fell off if the body, gagging out of reflex. Then he kept gagging out of desire to vomit, but nothing came up. Jack stayed there for three minutes, trying to make himself throw up. He slipped fingers down his own throat, but that only made him taste the blood on his fingers, and the blood tasted good.

After three minutes, he gave up. He buried his face in the bloody snow and breathed deep. He stood up and looked around at the bombed-out city. He looked towards his unit, to where his commanding officers were sitting, looking just as cold and degected as the rest of the unit. He looked down at his hands, at the gunk trapped under his nails.

He turned around and walked the other direction.

The Mistake occurred not long after he walked away from Stalingrad in the big scheme of things. It was perhaps after only a month of working his way westward that the thing that would be called Jack found his way onto the railroad tracks.

It was still winter, but now it was 1944. Jack was fed up with walking. He had been walking for a long time. He didn't get tired, not precisely, but he was mentally exhausted. He stopped only once every two or three days, and even then it was only to...eat. He didn't like eating, not one bit. He didn't like sneaking into morgues and hospitals, didn't like the way he felt flesh parting under his hands. He rationalized it by telling himself that if he didn't eat corpses he would eventually lose it and kill a lot more people. Good people. He definitely did not want that.

Eventually, Jack decided to jump a train, if one happened to pass him going in the right direction.

The mistake was an easy one to make. The first train that passed Jack going west was composed entirely of livestock cars, and that was the train that he jumped.

* * *

The boy called Jack left the Butcher's basement during the day, when the monster was asleep. He'd already snuck out twice in the previous week to get clothing and a bag. He'd made up his mind. If he didn't leave on his own, he'd be there forever.

He stepped out into the sunshine, squinting slightly through the sunglasses. It a gorgeous day, he noted idly, if you were into that kind of thing.

He walked to the nearest bus stop, which was about five miles away from the house he'd emerged from, and took the first bus that showed up. It was an old thing, even back then, but Jack was still quietly surprised at the sheer amount of wealth in this country, so he found it comforting. He sat and watched out the window as the backwoods of New England turned slowly into urban sprawl, marvelling at how large the houses were, at how the cars gleamed and sparkled, at how happily plump the children were.

I spent most of my childhood hungry, he thought. There's no envy in the thought, no blame. It wasn't not their fault that they were born in this decade, after all. There was no point in blaming them. Jack reserved the right to blame Wall Street though. From the few newspapers and magazines he'd managed to grab, Jack figured they were as guilty as you could get.

A girl slid into the seat next to his. Jack glanced at her, looked around at the mostly empty bus, then rolled his eyes and looked back out the window.

"Are you a deserter?" she asked.

Jack felt a shiver shoot up his spine, "What?"

"From 'nam," she said, and smiled. Jack looked closer, and saw that her eyes are ever so slightly red. That was something he'd never seen before.

"'Nam?" he asked.

"Vietnam? Nevermind, if you don't know about it, then you obviously aren't a deserter." She raised something that looked like a cigar, but couldn't have been because it was much too sloppily rolled. She took a drag and offered it to him between two fingers, wordlessly.

Jack took the thing carefully, looked at it. His mind was doing that careful sort of calculation that let him survive impossible situations. Jack put the thing to his lips and inhaled. He didn't feel the need to throw up or cough, not even as what he was fast realizing was not tobacco smoke flooded his lungs. He held his breath for a moment, trying to place the acrid scent and the earthy taste, then exhaled.

The girl was looking at him in appreciation. There was something familiar about her, and it wasn't just that she didn't look very clean. There was something in her bone structure, her bushy hair, that reminded him of something he'd seen. He offered her the drug back. He couldn't feel it working, not yet.

"Where did you crawl out of?" she asked.

Jack shrugged, "A basement."

She laughed, like it was all some big joke. "I'm on my way to a rally, wanna come?"

Jack's eyes narrowed behind his glasses, "Rally?" He asked.

"Oh ya. Burning draft cards and everything," she smiled dreamily at him. "Deserter like you will lap it all up." She turned her head then, and Jack realized why she looked familiar. She bore a resemblance to one of the vivisection patients. The one who woke up.

The woman had woken up with her guts spread out on a none-too-clean operating table and some of the sickest minds in the world looking down at her. Jack had been standing farther back, just waiting for them to finish (He'd stuffed himself full back then; it was almost like a buffet). The woman hadn't screamed, hadn't started crying. Instead, she'd begged that her child be left alone, be kept safe. Jack had heard her, if no one else had. He'd watched her lungs inflate and deflate as her speech became more and more like screams, and he'd heard her.

He'd also known that the child was already dead. When they were that young, they couldn't really do physical labor. Eventually, it all came down to how many mouths they had to feed and how much money it took to feed them. There hadn't been much left by then.

Jack had put the child in her grave with her, though it meant almost nothing. Nevermind the fact that he'd actually touched one of the bodies would have earned him derision for months afterwards, had anyone but the boys working in the ovens seen him do it. Jack had plied them with his share of rations for the next week. The woman's organs had been a very good meal.

Jack shook his head sharply, knocking away the memories. He could feel the drug a little now. It was a pleasant unfocused feeling, but he instinctively pushed it away. To his surprise, it cleared immediately.

The girl was slumped down in her chair, almost horizontal. Jack spared a glance for her rising and falling chest. Her breasts weren't large, but they weren't small either. All he saw was the lungs and the bones and the heart beneath her skin. He was still haunted by the visions.

"So?" She asked, "you gonna come?"

Jack smiled just a little, "Yes."

* * *

He was never able to explain to himself exactly how he got into the train car. He had scrambled up onto the roof, in the wind and the cold. He could feel his broken wrist straining, and he tried not to take so much weight on it.

He got a good grip with his left hand in the sheet metal and started pulling on the rivets, trying to find a loose panel. He twisted them using the fingers of his left hand.

The next thing he knew, he had a length of metal folded back like it was fabric, and he was dropping down into the train car.

It was warm in the car, but the metal at his back was freezing cold. He blinked behind the cloth over his eyes and let his vision refocus. The train was full of people, all looking at him. They were packed together like sardines: so tight under normal circumstances that he only had seven inches of space around him. The stink of sweat and urine was thick and heavy.

Jack raised his hands very slowly. They looked like they might jump on him.

A man said something that Jack couldn't understand. "Kim jesteś?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't understand," he said, "do you speak German? Deutsche?"

There was some awkward shuffling in the crowd, a few mumbled words.

"I do," said a small voice.

Jack looked down at the child. The boy was painfully thin, almost skeletal. He was looking up at Jack with huge brown eyes.

"Tell them I'm just looking for shelter," Jack said, "I'm not here to hurt anyone."

The boy nodded and said something to the surrounding people. They all shuffled and nodded. An old woman said something, and the child turned back. "Do you want food?"

Jack shook his head, "No, no thank you. Where is this train going?"

"Somewhere safe, they said."

"Who said?"

"The police."

Jack shivered nervously, but he nodded. Better the police than the army. He was technically a deserter.

The crowd was starting to disperse, as much as it could in the cramped space. Jack did his best to shuffle sideways, pushing along the edge of the car until he was in a corner. The others were still giving him a wide berth, and he took advantage by sliding down the wall until he hit the floor. He pulled his legs up tight, unsure if he'd even feel it if they stepped in his feet. He pressed against the outer wall of the car, preferring the cold.

The little boy pushed his way through the tangle of legs in front of him. He looked down at Jack, and Jack turned his head up to look at him.

"Where are your parents?" Jack asked, because it was the first thing that occurred to him.

"I don't know," The boy said, "we got separated."

Jack frowned, but didn't say anything. He was wondering what happened that they would be separated.

"What's your name?" The little boy asked.

The man that would be called Jack someday told him.

The little boy smiled, "Me too."

Jack returned the smile, "Well that won't work."

"What should we call me then?" The child asked.

Jack thought for a few seconds, and then said, "Jünger." Junior.

The child's eyes lit up, "That's what Papa calls me."

Jack became aware that there was a strange smell about the boy, something sharp and clear amid the stench of human waste. It was a clean smell, like fresh earth.

Jack sat back again, looking out of a torn seam in the train's metal. Outside, a world of brown and white flew past. He wondered, vaguely, where they were going and how he was going to eat when he got there.

* * *

He was rather perplexed by what he saw when he stepped off the bus, following close behind the odd girl. They were in a park or maybe a field. There were tents, brightly-colored and bearing the most ridiculous patterns. And then there were the people. They were...well, they were the opposite of what he had seen the last time he was in a field full of tents. They were unkempt and bearded, letting their hair tangle and their clothes collect dirt. They looked, thought the part of Jack that still used the word Führer fondly, like a bunch idiot savages. He snuffed out that thought and went back to looking around.

He still didn't like it. Where this many people were gathered there had to be a ringleader, somewhere, and he didn't like ringleaders. In fact, he hated ringleaders more than just about anything else. Except maybe doctors.

He looked around, searching for the ringleader, and he saw him. He saw him, standing by a bus with a crowd of people, speaking to them with his hands in front of him in an almost prayer-like position. Even that far away, he could hear the way the man's voice rose and fell, arousing passion and excitement, coaxing trust.

"Impressive, isn't it?" The girl said. She's still beside him.

Jack nodded slightly. "Who's that?" He asked, indicating the man and his group.

She looked at them, and an expression of awe crossed her face. "The People's Temple," she said, "I didn't expect them to be here."

The Temple. That rang some bells in Jack's brain. He knew about the People's Temple. They had sounded good to him, as close as humans could get to actually being holy. This changed things.

"You should stay away from them," He told the girl at his side, "they're going nowhere except straight down."

He decided to stay as far away from the religious sect as he possibly could.

"Whatever you say," she waved him off good-naturedly, "come on, I'm starving."

And Jack thought, "Me too."

She got something that looked a little like curry, but couldn't have been because it didn't smell right. She seemed to enjoy it, but Jack turned down the taste she offered.

Jack soon realized that he was putting out some kind of signal, because it seemed that every time someone walked by they nailed him as an ex-soldier. A Deserter, they said, like it was something to proud of.

Then he saw one man looking at him, watching him with a blatant hungry sort of look on his face. Jack had seen lust before, and this wasn't it. This was something more his speed: distinctly darker.

Jack walked right up to him, stopped a few feet away. The man was not really a man. He was barely more than a boy. He had a bag slung over one shoulder, and inside Jack could see a bottle filled with pink liquid.

"What?" The boy asked.

Jack just looked at him. He looked down at the mask in the man's hand. It was blue, and the eyes were huge dark holes full of shadow. He wanted the mask.

"What?" he asked again.

Jack gestured towards the object, "I'll pay you for that."

The man looked down at it, then looked back up at Jack. One of his eyebrows was raised. "You cannot be serious."  
Jack tilted his chin down and pulled his glasses slightly away from his eyes. "How much?"

The man didn't react. He didn't even flinch. He just tilted his head and smiled. He held out the mask wordlessly, eyes sparkling in a way that seemed almost angelic.

Jack took the mask and turned it over and over in his hands. There was a strange quality to it, heavy.

"Stay away from the food here," the man says, "enough Shrooms and Acid are going around to make it impossible not to get a dose."

Jack glanced back at the girl who seemed to be staring at something in the air above her.

"No need to worry about that," he informed the man, tucking the mask into his own bag.

He smiled that knowing little smile and walked away.

Jack didn't know it, but he'd just made contact with a Proxy, but one that would be dead in less than 72 hours and so could not tell anyone what he had done with his mask.

* * *

The train stopped, jarring the man who will be called Jack out of his stupor. Jünger was asleep nearby, half-wrapped in the coat Jack had given him, but he was stirring already. The whole train car was suddenly alert and nervous. Even the smell of shit couldn't mask their fear.

Jack got onto his knees and shook the boy awake, gently. They had been over this, and he was sure that Jünger understood the importance of what he had asked. These people had obviously seen stranger things than a man who could apparently see through cloth, but the people on the other side of that door hadn't.

Jünger woke up and looked around. "Where are we?" He asked, rubbing his eyes.

"I don't know yet," Jack replied, and grasped the boy's hand in preparation. He saw the child's eyes widen slightly at the cold, but he didn't care. He could smell something beyond the human waste and fear. Fire, he thought, smoke.

The door to the train car opened, and two men holding rifles looked in. They surveyed the contents of the car, then stepped back.

"Out," one of them said.

People began to hop out of the carriage. Jack let Jünger lead him by the hand, as if he were blind, and followed them out. Some of the car's passengers even turned to help him down, their hands warm on his elbows and shoulders. They helped the older and sicker occupants down too, but just for one second Jack was convinced it was really for him that they had stayed back.

He kept his head down until they were far enough away that he could be sure the guards could not see, and then he looked around. They were standing before a tall archway. On either side fences stretched away for a long way, too far for Jack to properly judge. Directly ahead, stretching across the arch, was a metal inscription, "Arbeit Macht Frei." Strangely, Jack could hear classical music playing. When he turned his head, he saw that it was a system of loudspeakers, and surely there was a record playing somewhere within the fence producing the sound.

They had joined a queue of people pouring out from the other train cars. Most of them looked no better than the people who had exited their car. Jack was convinced that this was the reason he could still smell the sickly-sweet stench of sickness.

Jünger was tugging at his hand, urging him to lean down. Jack did so.

"I don't see my parents," the boy whispered.

"I'm sure they're here somewhere," Jack replied. He pulled the little body closer to his, set a hand on his shoulder to reassure him.

"What are they doing with us?" Came the small voice.

Jack paused. He thought for several seconds. "It's a refugee camp," he said finally, "you said that your house was destroyed."

"My house wasn't destroyed," Jünger corrected impatiently, "they broke our windows and drew things on our door. Papa said they stopped people from coming to our store and-"

Jack squeezed his shoulder, "I forgot, I'm sorry, but we have to behave now." He included himself in the statement only because his stomach was threatening to digest itself and he didn't know how much longer he could wait.

The man waiting for them at the gate barely glanced at the pair as they passed. He took one look and waved them towards the first of two lines on the interior of the camp.

Jack leaned down again. "Ask one of them what we're in line for," he said to Jünger.

The little boy immediately turned to one of the guards standing next to the line and repeated the question.

The man looked down at the child with such contempt on his face that Jack had to restrain himself from reacting to the implied threat. He stood very still and looked only vaguely in the guard's direction.

"You're in line for the showers," the guard said, "little ones always go to the showers before we let them in. And handicapped ones like your brother."

At least they were buying his blind-man act.

Jack nodded his thanks to the man and let Jünger pull him along as the line moved.

"I'd like a shower," the boy said.

"So would I," Jack agreed.

They had to wait a long time for the shower to be ready for them. Another guard instructed them all to strip down. Jack did so grudgingly, aware of the scars that the war had marked him with, aware of the way he would stand out naked as the only one without visible signs of malnutrition. He tried to keep the blindfold on as they were led into the next room, but the guard at the door stopped him.

"Take off everything," he instructed, sounding more hostile than was necessary.

Jack untied the cloth slowly, keeping his eyes tightly closed. Now he really was blind. He let Jünger lead him into the next room and immediately felt more bodies packing in behind him. They were forcing as many people as possible into the room. To conserve a limited supply of water, he assumed.

Jack risked cracking open one eye to look around. The walls were concrete, as were the ceiling and floor. All around him were dirty people shifting nervously. He glanced up, saw the sprinkler heads above him that would release water. He closed his eye again.

The door shut with a clang, indicating the last of the people had stepped into the room. He braced for water, cold or hot it wouldn't matter to him any. Being clean would feel good, he supposed. It had been a long time since he'd last had a proper bath or shower. He must stink to everyone except himself.

There was a choking noise.

Jack opened his eyes and saw a man going blue. People were choking on something. They were gagging up bile and the last remains of their food, they were coughing and screaming, if they had the air. Something was seriously wrong.

He looked up. There was a faint hissing noise coming from the sprinkler head directly above him, and when he stretched up he could feel air against his hand. Not air, he thought, gas. Gas of some kind, and it was suffocating everyone in here.

Jack felt a tug at his hand, like Jünger was trying to take a step. He looked down at the boy's terrified expression, heedless of what the sight of his eyes would do to the child, then gritted his teeth and let go of the boy's hand. He stretched up on tip-toe and fumbled with the sprinkler, trying to find some way of turning it off. Around him, the people who had not yet been hit were starting to comprehend what was happening. They were screaming at the tops of their voices, pushing in every direction. Some of them started trying to reach the sprinklers too, but they were blocked by the spasming bodies of the ones directly beneath the outlets. Jack was the only one in any condition to reach the sprinkler and near enough to do it.

He felt the metal cut into the pads of his fingers, but there was no pain to come with it. He tried to turn the nozzle, to tighten it. He tried to find a switch of some kind, but he was just barely too short to be sure he wasn't missing something.

He gave up and reached down to Jünger, telling himself that he would find some way to save the child. He would breathe for him if he had to, but damn it, he was not going to let him die.

Jünger was gone. It didn't click for several seconds, but then Jack realized that the boy must have squeezed between some legs and gone looking for a way out. He was certainly small enough. He yelled the boy's name, but there was no answering cry.

Jack tried to move, but around him people were starting to fall still, the weakest ones already going out like lights. Their body weight was pressing on him, packed together as they were. He felt vomit slick his back as a man fell against him and fought down the urge to throw up himself. They were turning purple.

Surely someone as small as Jünger couldn't last long breathing whatever this was.

And suddenly Jack was crying. He was crying because he didn't understand, didn't understand any of it, and all he knew was that he was going to be stuck in here with all these dead people until someone bothered to open the door and get him out and he was so damned hungry he didn't think he could resist the urge to eat one of them.

It should be explained now that Jack had been "pure" up until this point. Yes, he had seen war and died in it, yes he had bloodied his hands and eaten human flesh, yes he had unwittingly been a part of the single most horrendous event in recent history, but up until that point he hadn't really understood it. On a cosmic level, on the level where gods work instead of humans, this is what really matters: the acts were all done with pure intent.

The thought that he might eat one of these people, one of these poor dead people who had been just like him only a few minutes before, this is what snapped Jack. He looked around, and realized that these same people who were now in their last throws around him were the same ones who had helped him down off the train, were the same ones who he had sat with him in the car and taught him, patiently, songs that he had never heard before. They had offered him some of their meager supplies of food and blankets, and even a warm place in the middle of the train, and this is what they got for it.

Jack screamed, and it was the sound of a pure thing dying.

When they cracked open the gas chamber and found someone still alive inside, the first thing the boys who tended the ovens did was call the guards. The first thing the guards did, after they had finished yelling at the boys, was look into the chamber. They saw the figure, hugging itself and rocking back and forth, weeping black tears with an intensity that none of them recognized.

One of them sent for Mengele.

* * *

 **AN:** Shameless self-advertisement: if you want to read my trilogy based on the Slenderman Mythos and Creepypasta, check out my profile. This story is filed under Mythology because I figured it was probably time to reach a new audience. Anyway, go crazy.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN:** I might be poking at things people don't want poked. If I am...

Well, I'd appreciate it if instead of flipping out on me you just wouldn't read it. As opposed to doing something to hurt me.

* * *

The year was still 1944, but now it was nearly summer, and the haze of heat from Auschwitz was almost visible in the air. It was the heat of rotting things and many human bodies sweating from both work and sickness.

The man who would someday would be called Jack was sitting on the ground under a tree outside the fence. He was tying a noose. It was the third noose that he had tied that day, and the 25th or so he had tied in the past month. He couldn't figure out how to do it quite right, to snap his neck at the place it was already broken. He had been trying for a lot longer than a month.

"Mengele wants to see you,"a voice said behind him.

Jack half-turned, looked at the guard standing behind him. He blinked once behind the dark glasses the doctor had given him. He got to his feet without asking why he was being called, dropping the noose and letting it hang limply from the tree. He gave it one experimental jerk, and it tightened around his hand. Maybe this one was right.

He followed the guard back into the camp, his head turning to track the arrival of another train. He'd be back on duty for those soon. Mengele was bound to lose interest eventually.

The shaking began as they moved into the actual camp, and Jack became aware of the dormitories and the people in them. Barely people, he told himself, Jews the lot of them. Not good at all. Bad breeding. He didn't really believe it, not after the train, not after everything that had happened. If he could have helped them, he would have.

He left his escort far behind, waving the man back to his post as he did so. He let himself into Mengele's compound, went into the room he knew he would find him in.

Sure enough, there was a body laid out on the table. A woman, her body already opened below her ribcage. Jack felt his gorge rise: one of the sterilisation experiments. He hated these.

Mengele was slightly bent over the table, though in reality it was two of the other scientists who were in charge of this little endeavor.

Without pause, Jack took the notebook from the countertop and opened it to a fresh page. His first time sitting in on one of these sessions, the doctors had taken one look at the way he was trembling and confined him to taking notes. He would cut something by mistake if they let him use the instruments, they said.

Jack sketched out, in rough strokes, what was happening in front of him. The woman's ovaries had been subjected to high doses of radiation, and they didn't look much like ovaries anymore. They were closer to amorphous clumps of tumors than anything. He took down notes as the doctors rattled them off, and when they were done he wordlessly set down the notebook on the countertop and left the room.

He entered the children's rooms almost two minutes later, with pockets full of hard candies. They grouped around him, and he offered the sweets in open palms, letting them take them without concerning himself with the chill they must feel from the light touches.

One of the girls took three candies from his palm, but before Jack could scold her, she turned and ran to two occupied beds. The little bodies inside them were shivering with violent fever. The tubes running between the beds were filled with blood.

Jack let the others finish distributing the candies among themselves, and then he went to the beds and started to unhook the two children from each other. Now, here, his hands were steady and sure. He had seen the tubes be hooked up, and he unhooked them gently, using the gauze he always kept in his pockets for things like this. The others watched him silently, sucking on their candies. Many of them were already marked by Mengele's hands. Some of them had patches over their eyes, others had stitches closing cuts on arms and legs. Jack had helped them too, some of them. Some of them had wiggled out of the experiments themselves.

Jack finished unhooking the transfusion machine and wrapping the cuts on the wrists of the children. He wrapped up the equipment and set it aside. One of the children took her brother's hand and pulled him to Jack.

"You saved him," she told him, pushing the boy forward, "you told the doctor not to use him."

Jack looked down at the little boy and smiled a little. He wasn't thinking about the one he saved. He was thinking about the two he didn't save, sewed back-to-back by their wrists and necks, how they rotted from the inside out and cried every night because they were in so much pain.

"I'm glad he's safe," Jack said. He got up and went to falsify the record of the experiment.

* * *

It was 1978, and over all Jack was proud of himself and everyone else in the world. The country he had called his home for the last almost 30 years had been making leaps and strides. He is immensely satisfied with the situation.

Except at that moment he wasn't in the United States. He was in some indefinable section of South America called Guyana, and he was extremely concerned about this particular section of South America. Somewhere in all this jungle was a settlement of a thousand people: Jonestown. Jack really, really needed to find Jonestown. He was panicking.

There had been a woman, a little more than 15 years previously, who Jack had told to stay away from the People's Temple. She hadn't listened. He hadn't known about it, not until just recently, not until it was too late.

He didn't want to lose her, not like this. He didn't want to lose one more person.

Jack ducked under a tree branch, nearly fell over a bird that shot out from beneath his feet at the last second. Then he pushed through the outer edge of a clearing and saw a plane.

There were figures on the ground, some of them still and some of them not. He glanced at them, saw blood, glanced away. Gunshots?

He was too late.

* * *

They ran, and the person who would be called Jack within a few months was disgusted. They were fleeing inwards, back towards Berlin. The proud empire was collapsing. And Jack was being separated from the children.

It broke his heart to leave them, or it would have if he had a heart anymore. As it was, Jack went reluctantly but not ungratefully. He didn't think he could stand the stink of Auschwitz for one second longer.

Jack stood at the edge of the bonfire and personally tossed every single piece of paper that contained his handwriting into the flames. Mengele's experiments be damned: he didn't want the Soviets knowing someone else had been part of it.

A week later, he was at Dachau.

* * *

They were all dead. That was the first thing that Jack thought. He was too late, and they were all dead.

The bodies were strewn over the ground. Some were tangled together, some were singular. Some faces were contorted in agony, some were almost peaceful.

Jack felt himself starting to shake. He wasn't hungry, thank god, but he was remembering. There were huge heaps of bodies in his mind, and trenches, and bonfires, and suddenly he was feeling very nauseous. He held onto what food there was in his stomach, but only just managed it.

At the center of the spread of bodies there was a pavilion. Jack picked his way through them, doing his exercises to maintain control over his shaking muscles. He focused on putting himself somewhere safe, somewhere indestructible. It was only theoretical, but it helped.

In the pavilion g was a room with many tables, and on one of those tables was a line of pots filled with purple liquid. Jack stepped close, saw the ladle. He nodded to himself.

He reached for one of the little cups and took a scoop of the punch. He looked at it meditatively for a moment, then raised the cup and drank.

It was a taste he knew. There had been one other time in his life he had tasted it. That was to prove a point. It had worked. There was something else in the cocktail too... some kind of tranquilizer would be his guess.

Jack turned his head and spat out the liquid. It landed on the stricken face of an infant. Jack leaned down and wiped the liquid from the tiny corpse. Its mother still cradled the little body. In her own pain, she had tightened her grip almost to a strangle hold.

Jack felt his walls coming up. The visualization was working: he didn't feel the deaths anymore. Only a thousand more, not too many at all. He was only really responsible for one of them. That wasn't so bad. At least he wasn't going to get shot by anyone.

* * *

It turned out that Dachau was worse than Auschwitz had been. For one thing, it was almost three times as large, and growing larger all the time.

The guard duty was endless. When he wasn't opening train cars up and shoving people around he was sitting nearby, watching it happen. And here there were other things going on too. The other guards had been worn down by the endless stream of dead bodies, the displaced people. Some of them were going more than a little crazy. There were prisoners who would disappear for a day, then come back and simply lay in the bunkhouse for days on end. There were others who simply vanished only to turn up two days later, mutilated beyond all recognition save Jack's.

In fact, he was looking down at one of these bodies when he heard the yelling. He recognized it vaguely as English.

Jack stuck his head out of the building, searching for the source of the noise. He saw soldiers wearing a strange uniform pointing guns at a couple of the guards. Someone pulled a trigger, and a spray of blood leapt into the air.

Jack ducked back into the building with the body. He spent a few moments hyperventilating and being very scared. Then he slipped out the other entrance. On the other side of the building were a few prisoners. A little girl ran to Jack, her skeletal legs giving the movement an insect-like quality. She reached up to him, pulled at his sleeves and hands.

Jack crouched down and held her hands. A few others came forwards, tried to all talk over each other. They produced an extra set of clothing, forced it into his hands. Jack shook his head, tried to give the clothing back to them, but they wouldn't take it.

A voice, speaking English, started telling them to move away. They did, but not willingly, some of them very clearly not fully comprehending the words. Jack didn't get all of it either, but the tone communicated the meaning fairly well.

Rough hands seized him. Two men, larger even than Jack was, and by that point he was well on his way to 6'5." The child rushed forward, making as if to grab Jack, but he shook his head sharply and she stopped. Her hand dropped to her side.

They led Jack away, twisting his arms behind him, threatening to misalign the bones in his broken forearm. He winced a little, though in reality he felt no pain. The men behind him were talking, but Jack knew almost no English. He could decode only two or three words of the conversation and even then the meanings were fuzzy.

They walked him a place near the entrance to Dachau, or the subcamp of Dachau that Jack was in. It was then that he saw it wasn't just him that they had: there were others. About 50 in all, maybe more, and they were being lined up against a building. The other guards looked just as uncertain as jack felt, but they certainly weren't as guilty. They probably never would be.

On impulse, Jack turned to the men behind him. They both looked at him. Jack took a moment to formulate what he wanted to say in English.

"I'm sorry," He said.

One of the men barked a harsh laugh, taught with disbelief. "It doesn't mean Jack Shit whether you're sorry or not."

They pushed him into line, where Jack stood for the longest time. Just when it seemed like they might just arrest them, someone gave an order.

Triggers were pulled.

Jack's bullets hit him in the chest and side. They slammed him backwards, and his body instinctively doubled over. Then, because he had just been shot and he did not want to be noticed, he played along further. He dropped to the ground and screamed,, rolled side-to-side and looked as if he was trying to hold his blood inside of himself. The performance must have been convincing because a shadow stepped up. Jack was vaguely aware of a gun, and then the man shot him in the head and the world went out again.

* * *

He found the man sitting by himself in a room away from the main pile of bodies. Jim Jones was already holding a gun when Jack walked in. The man looked up, saw Jack, and froze.

Jack held up the cup, "You don't want to join them?"

The man made no reply.

"Right," Jack said, "I've done this once before, so let's just get it over with."

"What are you talking about?"

Jack smiled, exposing sharp teeth. He raised the cup and drank, swallowed the cyanide and the tranquilizer. His stomach clenched, tried to force it back up, but Jack bit his own tongue and quelled the gag reflex.

The man was staring now, waiting. Two minutes passed, and when Jack hadn't dropped dead he nodded.

"Who are you?" He asked.

Jack smiled, "Jack Shit." He took the gun from Jones' hand. "The last guy I did this for did a lot worse than you, but I feel like you'll get along." He checked that the safety was off.

"Who was that."

Jack just smiled. He pulled the trigger and shot Jim Jones in the head.

* * *

When Jack woke up no one was nearby anymore, which was lucky. He looked around carefully, then got to his feet. His side was still bleeding, but the liquid was slow and thick.

He looked around again, then turned to look at the fence. How fast could he get out of here?

* * *

 **AN:** Again, if I get something wrong let me know. I don't know how precise this one is, but I did do a fair amount of research so it should be pretty close.


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** Back on the ball. I need to get back in the swing of things. College apps have sucked out my soul. Jack is a good place to start things off. I'm familiar enough with him that the words come easily.

* * *

Chapter 3

The secretary at the desk claimed it was 1992. Jack didn't really believe her. Sure, he had been distracted for a little while, but surely it hadn't been that long. It couldn't have been.

He sat down in one of the waiting room chairs and pulled out his notebook. There was a pencil stuck into it, marking a page with a half-finished sketch on it. It was the latest vision that had squirmed into his head at night. Jars of eyeballs. How he hated them: the preserving fluid filling the air with sharp medical smells and robbing the orbs of their natural flavor. The way Mengele could never quite figure out how to get them clean all the way. How taking them left giant dark holes in the heads of the subjects, and how those holes filled up with blood that slowly pooled and solidified and turned black. How, before they filled with blood, if you used something to move the membranes around, you could see their brains. Just thinking about them made him unbearably hungry and disgusted at his own reaction.

The secretary was giving him a weird look. Jack guessed he deserved it. He had walked in, asked to see the burn victim, and then proceeded to lie that he was the boy's brother, only to be informed that the entire family was currently in the room, and there was no second brother mentioned in any paperwork.

Which made the situation...awkward, but what choice did he have?

The pull had started months ago, and had gradually dragged him, against his will, to this suburban backwoods, where the first newspaper he picked up cheerfully informed him that a boy had been lit on fire by a delinquent five years older than he was and was in critical condition.

Jack had sat down on a bench at the bus stop and thought for a good five hours. Obviously, it was his turn now to take on a new changeling. Everyone had to do it eventually. He had just always assumed that his would come later, hundreds of years later preferably, and packaged in a crate like he had gone to the Butcher. Neat and easy to handle.

What, Jack wondered, would being burned alive do to the psyche of a twelve year old monster? There was one surefire way to find out, so he went to have a conversation with the kid.

And now he was sitting in the waiting room of a hospital, sketching a jar full of blue eyes while waiting for the kid's actual family to leave so he could go up and find out what the hell was going on. How the rest of the family was alive he didn't know.

There was a bark of sharp laughter, almost animal in its pitch, that made Jack look up. He saw two adults, a man and a woman, both looking tired but happy, and a teenage boy, sallow with eyes that jumped from side-to-side in that ex-con way that's immediately noticeable. For one moment, Jack thought that this is his monster, and then the little family moves, and Jack saw that there was another boy.

He was sitting in a wheelchair, leaning forward to look up at his brother. Something was very wrong with him. His skin was bleached white and his eyes were huge and dark and staring. His smile looked like someone had slashed his mouth away, and as they passes Jack caught a few words from his mouth.

"Don't you think I look pretty, Lui?"

Jack waited for them to pass, and when they were gone he stood up, ignoring the secretary's reaction to his presence, and walked calmly to the door.

That was not normal. Jack had met a lot of monsters in the 60 years since he had been hit with an artillery shell, and he knew that most monsters were saner than humans. They put most human concepts of consciousness to shame. Whatever had been in that wheelchair, it hadn't been a monster, but it sure as hell wasn't human either.

Once he was outside, Jack ran for the bus stop and got onto the first bus that pulled up, not caring where he went as long as it was far away from the half-changed thing in the wheelchair that was surely going to rip its entire family apart later that day.

* * *

If Jack had ever chosen to remember his childhood-he tried not to think about it-the one thing that would have stood out to him was… Her. More than his parents, more than his three siblings, more than the youth groups and the indoctrination. She was what his life had revolved around.

He didn't remember her name. It was never that important. She was the first one he thought of when he thought "home." That was who she was to Jack: Home.

She had been his childhood sweetheart, if those words could be used in clear conscience. She had been everything good in his world for 16 years, from his first memory to the day he enlisted. She had been his first kiss, his first lover, his first real confidant.

And when he went back for her…

Getting back home was hard. He had to walk most of the way back: the roads were practically gone. The bombs had been targeting the infrastructure of the country. Of course there were plenty of bombed out buildings too, and the more he saw, the more concerned he got. Was his family alive? His siblings were all sisters, so he didn't think any of them had been in the army. He could never be sure about the oldest of them: she liked to push limits.

It turned out that, yes, his family was alive. They were a little worse for wear, tired and nervous, and one of the girls had suffered a broken wrist in recent weeks, but they were alive. Jack did not go to them. He watched for a long time, and then he turned away. He would not burden them with this thing he had become, with everything he had seen and done in the past years. He was not that cold hearted.

He turned away, already thinking about where he would go next, where he would have to go, who he was going to find and seek retribution on.

And then someone tackled him from behind.

* * *

Five minutes later, Jack was off the bus again. He paced in a circle, earning several nervous stares from people passing on the street. Yes, the kid was only half changed. Yes, it was probably completely insane. Yes, there was a very real possibility he was going to get mauled if he went in there.

But, down at the heart of it, that was still a 12 year old boy. A poor scared boy who really should be nothing but a ghost right now. Damn modern medicine: if Jack had been burned alive in his early teens he would have died almost instantly. Now, instead of a clean changing they had this messy half-finished business.

Jack started walking fast back towards the town. He wasn't that far away. It wasn't that long. He had time. He could make it.

It had been fairly late in the afternoon when the boy was picked up from the hospital. It was growing dark by the time Jack reached the house that, according to the papers, the fire had occurred at. He looked up and down the street, spotted a small toy soccer goal and two balls in the yard nextdoor and decided that that was probably the right house.

Jack walked up to the door and rang the bell. Nothing happened. He rang it again. Still nothing. He turned the handle. Locked.

Jack lost patience. He took two steps back, aimed carefully, and kicked the door just below the handle. There was a snap like a gunshot as the door flew backwards. He stepped into the suburban house and breathed in.

There was death in the air. There was the metallic tang of blood and the thick smell of fast-cooling meat. Jack swallowed down a flood of saliva.

The first body was in the hallway. A woman, the mother. She had been stabbed in the stomach and chest. Five times in all, but the first three attempts had not been deep enough to do real damage. Hesitation, Jack noted. That was good.

The second body was in the living room, and this one bore no signs of remorse. There had been a quick brutal yank on the hair, and then a swift stab to the neck, like the killer had been behind the man. Like an execution, Jack thought, and shook the thought off.

The brother had been in bed when he died. All the way to the room there were smears of blood and cuts in the plaster of the walls. Pictures were knocked down or broken. There was no way to mistake the meaning in the scene: this life has ended now. The body itself didn't really have a face anymore. The stabbing trend continued, but this time it was in the head.

This, Jack thought, was very personal. He looked reflectively at what remained of the brown hair, the hardened eyes. He guessed that this boy had taken the fall for his brother on something, and gone to jail for his troubles. Jack didn't know about Juvenile Detention Centers yet. He figured jail was jail.

Jack left the boy's body be and turned around. He went back downstairs and looked around for the little monster's escape route. He found none.

He went back upstairs, wondering if he had somehow missed an attic, and was just examining the ceiling of the hallway when he heard a soft sound.

Jack stopped breathing. His body screamed at him to run, and run far far away. Instead, he walked towards the sound. He pushed open the door to the other bedroom. The soft glow of a night light silhouetted the shape on the bed, tucked beneath the blankets.

Hardly daring to believe his luck, Jack crept forward. His footsteps were soft on the carpeted floor. His hands twitched, in need of a weapon, but he did not reach for one.

The shape on the bed stirred. A small voice, so different from the one he had heard earlier, said, "Hello?"

Jack stopped moving.

"Who are you?" the monster asked, its dark eyes huge and scared. It could see him. There was something wrong with its face. There were cuts, bloody and open. The muscles were exposed; Jack could see them moving.

"I'm here to help you," Jack replied honestly. He took a step forward.

The boy had a knife in his hand instantly. He pointed it at Jack. "Don't touch me," he spat.

Jack moved forward again, thinking it was only a matter of time before someone saw the broken door and called the cops.

The boy lunged. The knife slammed into Jack's abdomen, piercing his skin easily. Jack looked down at the knife, up at the face of the boy in front of him.

He grabbed the monster around the waist and lifted him under one arm.

The boy was screaming now, yelling nonsense about the police at the top of his lungs. He was kicking and hitting, but Jack didn't feel it.

He walked back down the stairs. The boy went silent at the sight of his mother's body. Jack shifted him up higher, holding him around the chest rather than the waist.

He carried the thing out the back door, into the alley behind the house. There he set him down. The child was dressed in a bloody hoodie and dark jeans. It would do.

Jack started to tell the boy that he was here to help, that if the child stuck close everything would be okay.

It was on him in an instant. It ripped the knife out of his side and brought it up to hit Jack's sternum.

He felt no pain of course, but even so he was aware of his bone shattering. Blood flooded his lungs, and Jack sat down hard on the ground.

"I said don't touch me!" The monster was shrieking. Then it was gone. Not back towards the house, thank god, but off into the night. Into another place.

Jack decided it was better to let the boy go this one time. He was going to have a hard enough time finding somewhere else safe to heal as it was.

* * *

Jack knew immediately who had him around the chest, hands pressing on broken ribs, making the bone that had at one point punctured his lung rake again across soft tissue. He moved her hands down briskly and spun her away behind the nearest building.

She said his name, hugged him again, this time from the front, and he put his arms around her too. He rocked her back and forth for a long time, eyes closed behind the glasses. Then she pulled back almost violently, and slapped him smartly across the face.

"I thought you were dead," She hissed.

Jack raised a hand to touch his cheek. There was no pain, but he could feel the startling transfer of energy. He found his voice after a moment. "I'm sorry," he said, "things came up."

"How are you here?!" She asked, "we know what happened in the Soviet Union. How could you make it out and not tell us?"

Jack looked at her, really looked at her. She was blonde and slight, small around the torso, with thin legs and arms. There was no muscle on her, and suddenly he found himself perturbed by it, by how little physical work she had ever done.

"I had a lot of things on my mind," he said, "there are… there are things you're better off not knowing about."

She said his name again, pleadingly. Her big blue eyes were filling with tears.

Jack suddenly recalled that they had spent so much time trying to get blue eyes, had gone through so many people trying to engineer a certain color. He was starting to shake again. He leaned forward, looked left and right. No one could see them there, pressed against the wall.

He reached inside himself, looking for that familiar warmth he'd had in his chest every time he thought of her for the past 6 years, and found nothing. He scrabbled for the affection and came up terrifyingly blank.

"What is it?" She asked, her brow creasing. She looked vaguely unsettled, "take off the glasses, I can't tell what you're thinking." She reached up and grasped one of the lenses.

Jack jerked back, or tried to, he grabbed her wrist, "Don't."

"Why not?" She looked confused.

Jack reached again for soft words, for fondness, and again he missed it. There was nothing. He was dead.

"I need to go," Jack said, "I'm sorry." He stepped sideways, away from her, and ducked out of the alley. It was over.

* * *

Luckily for Jack, the place where the little monster had stabbed him was not far away from the Butcher's shop. He snuck back, doing his best to hide the spreading stain on his jacket from passersby, and went down into the basement of the house so quietly he was sure even the creature would not hear him.

He slipped into his old room, pulled off the jacket and shirt to look at the damage. There was no saving his sternum. He was going to have to reassemble it.

Jack stepped back out into the open, found the equipment cart and pulled it over to the operating table. He turned on the light above the table, double-checked the tools to make sure they were clean. He found a mirror and brought it over, propped it on a chair so that he would be able to see it from the table. Then he stripped off his jeans and sat on the edge of the operating table.

He laid down, took a scalpel from the tray and put it to the hollow between his collarbones. He pushed in, broke the skin, and slowly, so slowly, peeled back the muscle. He tilted the mirror, and followed where his midline used to be with the blade. It took a while, but eventually the remains of his ribcage were exposed. Jack set aside the scalpel and started picking out the fragments of bone.

The kid was strong, that was for sure. He hadn't changed quite right, but some of the benefits had obviously kicked in. That was going to be a problem.

The urge to find the child was fading. He could still feel a slight pull, but it wasn't nearly as strong as it had been. He hoped that meant the kid was going to be okay. It could have been worse, it could have been something like the Butcher.

He switched to a pair of tweezers to pull out the smaller fragments. His lungs were starting to leak blood into his chest cavity. He wished for a moment that the Butcher was here to help, then dismissed the thought. He still wasn't ready to face the creature, not after what had happened.

He still felt vaguely dirty at the memory of it. He tried not to think about it. When he met the girl by the name of Lea, more than 20 years later, he would have more than a little empathy for her situation.

Jack worked on himself, using the mirror to guide his hands, for another hour. He reached to the cart for the tube of adhesive so he could start reassembling his bones, but his hand found nothing. He had forgotten to get it.

Jack stayed where he was, looking at the mirror reflecting his guts. He was screwed. He couldn't get up, not like this, with his lungs slowly inflating and deflating in the open air. He had to do something.

Jack took a breath. "Hello?" he called, as loudly ashe dared, "are you there?!" His voice was still weak, and fluid came up his windpipe as the remaining blood in his lungs was forced out.

There was a shifting from near the door. Jack reached out one bloody hand and changed the angle of the mirror so he could look. It was the Butcher, with several more limbs than he had last seen it, blinking its golden eyes in amazement.

"I need a bottle of glue, or tape, or something," Jack said, "I don't care what as long as it will hold my bones together."

The creature used one hand to pull a bottle of something from a cabinet and two more to write something in the little book it always carried.

"It doesn't have to last long," Jack continued, most out of unease now, "I heal fast. I just need to set it."

The creature thrust the pad of paper in front of his face, "What happened?"

"A little monster," Jack said. He wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth, "strong, but nowhere near as sane as he needs to be."

The Butcher made a noise. It scribbled again for a moment, "Stay still, I'll put it back together."

Jack tried to protest, but the Butcher was already taking the tray of bone fragments. It crossed to the other side of the room and put on a worklight. Jack sighed, watching his own lungs expand and contract in the mirror. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back. It was okay. The Butcher was physically incapable of hurting him. It would help, by virtue of the pairing and a faint sort of respect.

It was more than an hour before the Butcher had pieced his sternum back together. It brought it back to the operating table and presented it to Jack, along with the bottle of adhesive. It wasn't proper medical procedure, but right then Jack didn't really care. He took pains when he was taking meals, but on himself he couldn't care less.

Jack fitted the bone back into place and pulled the muscle back over his chest. He reached for the needle and thread and sewed himself up slowly, carefully. When he was done he sat up.

The Butcher scribbled in its pad, "Is he here?"

Jack shook his head, "No. He ran off. The kid is only half-changed as far as I can tell. All sloppy."

"Will you be able to handle it when you are."

Jack looked down, thought about it for a moment. "Yes," he said, "I can handle that."

It just looked at him for a moment. It twitched. Then it wrote a moment more, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," Jack said. He got up, and pulled on his jeans, hopping from foot to foot to get them on. He dug into his bag and took out his extra jacket. He was going to burn the old stuff. It was useless now.

The Butcher shoved a paper into his face again. "I'm sorry."

Jack sighed, turned to look at the creature. "I know, and I have to forgive you."

The creature's shoulders dropped.

"I'm never going to trust you ever again," Jack said, "and once I actually have the kid, I'm not bringing him anywhere near you."

The Butcher inclined its head. "That's fair."

"I'm glad you agree." Jack got to his feet and left.


	4. Chapter 4

**AN:** Christmas break from college, so here I am wrapping up this story. One more chapter and then we're done. I've had so much fun writing this. I've loved every second of it. Even the extremely long throwaway section that none of you will ever get to read. I'm sorry this one has taken so long, but honestly I'm glad it's going anywhere at all.

* * *

Jack eventually found the little monster again. Of course, by the time he found him, he wasn't exactly little anymore. The creature that people had taken to calling Jeff the Killer was fully grown, all muscle and sinew, no baby fat to speak of.

He was also disemboweled.

Jack descended the last few steps into the morgue and hurried to the slumped form against the wall. The poor thing was actually holding a length of his own intestines. Obviously he had been trying to insert them back into his body, but was in too much pain. His front was covered in blood and bile, both his own.

The man reacted to his footsteps, and turned his head sharply to look at Jack. He was scarred. His face was split by two long marks on either side of his mouth. Jack couldn't see his entire face because of the hair. He was going to have to do something about that hair eventually, comb it at least.

The creature tried to stand, but its legs were shaky and it was obvious that he was losing a lot of blood.

"Easy," Jack said, "I'm here to help you."

"Stay away from me," The man growled, producing a knife from somewhere.

Jack kicked it out of his hand. He was too weak to stop him. He crouched down and made eye contact through his glasses, "I'm here to help you, if you don't hit me."

"I don't need help."

"Right," Jack said. He picked the creature up, side-on, his arms supporting the back and legs, all very gentle and stable.

The man winced and squirmed.

"Hold still," Jack snapped. He set him down again on the edge of the slab and kneeled again. Now he could see the whole face. It had hard dark eyes and an unhealthy pallor. "Now I'm going to sew you back up and we're going to get out of here. Once we're somewhere safe, I'll explain everything, okay?"

Jeffery nodded. He looked sick.

"I'm going to give you something for the pain," Jack said, "an injection. Try to relax."

The eyes went wide, "No."

Jack paused with his hand in his bag, "No?"

"No needles."

Jack started to insist, then stopped himself. Trying to make this creature do something it did not want to do was a bad idea. He didn't want to get off on the wrong foot.

"Okay," he said, "I have pills, but they'll take half an hour to work, and they're not as effective."

The creature paused, "The injection."

Jack took out the tranquilizer he had taken from the last Organization attempt to capture him. He had removed it from the darts and loaded a syringe, which he tapped gently to remove any air bubbles. He squirted a little of the liquid out, just to be sure, and then turned back to the killer.

"Don't look," he said.

Jeffery obediently turned his head. Jack pressed the needle into his neck and depressed the plunger. The dark eyes went wide and then rolled back. That was probably going to come back and bite him later, but he wasn't going to try to put the man's intestines back in with him conscious.

Jack used the coroner's tools on the cart beside the slab and cut open the shirt. He removed it entirely, and tossed it away. He stepped away and made sure his hands were clean, and then returned. He slipped his fingers into the open gash and pulled it open, wincing as he did so. The spilled intestines slipped neatly back into place. He barely even had to touch them. That was the amazing thing about the body: everything fit so nicely.

Jack slid one hand inside the man and repositioned the spilled entrails by memory and touch, then removed it. His hands were covered in blood. He had to get this sewn up.

He worked quickly and effectively, but he was only just fast enough. By the time he was finishing the final stitches, the Killer was stirring.

Jack leaned over him and gave him a couple light slaps, "Up you get," he said, "come on now."

The man groaned and opened his eyes, blinked at Jack, at the room around him. He sat up and clutched at his stomach, doubled over in pain.

"Here we go, Jeffery," Jack said, offering him a single red pill. One of the few he had. The only one that was truly genuine and therefore guaranteed to work. "Your name is Jeffery, right?"

The man nodded, "Jeff, ya." He looked at the pill.

"It won't hurt you," Jack said. Something odd was happening to him, he could feel it. It was a protective urge, almost forgotten, stirring in his chest. He wanted to bundle this creature off somewhere safe and make sure he was never hurt again. It was also a dangerous urge, Jack knew that, not least of all because in the end it would only hurt Jeffery to obey it.

The man snagged the pill from his hand and swallowed it dry. "Where's my shirt?" he asked, looking down at the wound on his stomach.

"I threw it away," Jack said, "it was useless."

The man growled, "don't touch my things."

"We'll get you a new one," Jack said. He was looking towards the other occupied slab. The sheet was still over it. He stepped away from Jeffery and towards it.

"Don't!"

Jack stopped walking and looked back.

"Don't touch her," Jeff said, "she might...might still be alive."

Jack stepped decisively towards the slab and lifted the sheet from the head. The body underneath was so charred that it no longer resembled a human. There was no skin, no eyes, no hair, only burnt exposed muscle, and there wasn't much of that. It brought back memories, but Jack pushed them aside.

Just to be sure, he took a pulse. There was no warmth, no heartbeat, probably no veins left.

He glanced back at Jeff, "She's dead."

The man blinked at him.

Jack let the sheet fall back into place. He looked at the chart. The cause of death was not burns. It was listed as Childbirth.

He turned back to Jeffery, "I'm going to do something you don't want to see."

The man swallowed hard.

"Don't look, okay?"

He shook his head, "What is it?"

Jack walked over to him and pulled away the coroner's cart, "I'm going to cut her open."

Jeffery looked ready to throw up again, but he didn't argue.

Jack pulled aside the sheet again, leaving the head covered, only exposing the lower torso. There did in fact appear to be a baby, but it was definitely still inside her. He could see the outline of it through the skin. He gagged a little, but took up a scalpel anyway. He made a single incision in the muscle, only about half a centimeter deep, and reached into her. He found the child, just as dry and lifeless as its mother, and removed it. It was tiny, far too small. The slimness of the parent had made it look large. Jack judged it, at a glance, to only be about 6 months along.

It was very very dead.

He set it down on its mother's stomach and pulled the white sheet back into place. His hands were shaking.

He turned away from the slab and went back to Jeffery. The man hadn't been looking, which was a blessing.

"Come," he said as he passed him, "we're not far away from a safe house."

The man staggered to his feet and immediately stumbled. Jack noticed and ducked back fast, caught him by one arm and pulled it over his shoulders. He could have carried Jeffery over one shoulder, but this was less humiliating.

Jack looked down at the man's feet. He was wearing shoes, and not worn-out shoes either. They looked new. There was something about the way he set his weight.

"Your ankles are shot to hell, aren't they?" He asked.

Jeffery flinched, "You can tell?"

Jack just nodded, "You sprain them a lot."

"I got-" he broke off with a little grunt of pain as one of the ankles rolled beneath a misstep. Jack hauled him back up, pulling the man over so more weight rested on him "I got shoved down a flight of stairs, sprained both of them. They haven't been the same since."

"Hopefully that pill will fix that problem too," Jack said. Otherwise, it would mean visiting the Butcher, and breaking his promise. He would not put this newly-formed creature in that kind of danger.

They left the building and Jack hustled them to the safe house.

* * *

The thing that had just started calling itself Jack went to France, mostly out of guilt. There he became Jacques for a short while because that's what everyone called him. He had a little French going in, and he found that the longer he stayed and the more he talked to people the more he picked up. After three years, he was fluent.

He travelled a lot and did manual labor for little money. He helped rebuild things.

Here and there tales sprang up, about a tall man in dark glasses who performed what seemed close to miracles. In one town, it was said, he braved a collapsed building, squirming through spaces impossibly small, to reach a trapped child. In another, he lifted a steel beam off a fallen man. In yet another, there were suddenly whispers about how the local heart-throb had gone starry-eyed himself. "Over a man," they murmured in bars and on street corners.

Every one of these stories were true, but no one ever bothered link them together. If they had, they would have noticed that as time went on, the man had gotten quieter and more reserved. He couldn't seem to shake some of the feelings, some of the indoctrination. The guilt was the worst. The only time Jack got a break from the guilt in those five years was when he seduced the local celebrity. His own little rebellion, he had thought to himself. A huge "fuck you," in the face of everything he had been taught. It helped, for a bit, and then the guilt came back, worse than ever.

The worst thing about the whole ordeal was the the sweet boy begged him not to go, then begged to go with him. Jack almost let him too. Almost. He remembered at the last second that he was not human, that he probably had never been human, and he left. The man would never be the same again, he figured. Maybe that was a good thing. He wouldn't lie to himself his whole life.

He thought about those nights all the way to Spain. When he got there, angry at himself for being so stupid, he marked the inside of his left wrist with a triangle in charcoal. It was a reminder. No such stories spread in Spain.

* * *

There were people in the safe-house. Proxies, all sitting around the table and drinking.

"Jack!" One of them called out as they came in, "back so soon?"

Jeffery stepped through the door behind Jack, blinking at the unfamiliar surroundings. Jack had given him his jacket and now he was in nothing but a T-shirt that left most of his arms exposed. There was scarring on his right arm above the elbow and on his left below it, shrapnel marks mostly.

"Leave," He told the Proxies. They just looked at him for a moment. "I said leave, so get out before I make you."

They rose without a fuss and left, pressing up uncomfortably close to Jeffery on the way by.

Jack went to the table and pulled out a chair, "Sit." He said.

Jeffery crossed the room and sat, heavily. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Half-formed control mechanisms, Jack guessed.

"Let's see this again," Jack said, pulling down the zipper on the jacket.

The wound was almost healed now. It was neatly closed up and scarring over fast.

Jeff looked down at it and gasped, then started coughing.

"Just a little longer," Jack told him, "and you can go rest."

The man nodded.

"I'm going to touch the wound," Jack said, "to made sure it's healing correctly. Let me know if I hurt you."

Another nod.

Jack used his fingertips, gently. He felt around the cut for any odd lumps or growths, because sometimes that would happen with the red pills. He tested his own stitching gently, pulling a little to make sure there was no space between the two halves of the wound. That got him a wince.

"You're very calm," He said to Jeffery after a minute.

"I'm just dead tired," The man replied, "and after what I've seen in the last 24 hours, nothing will ever surprise me again."

"I doubt that," Jack turned and dug in his bag. He came out with an extra shirt, which he handed to Jeffery. "There you go. That will help."

The man put it on carefully, wincing all the while. Once the shirt was on, he let out a low groan and sat back again.

"Do you mind if I look at your ankles?" Jack asked, "I need to know if you can move fast."

"Go ahead," Jeffery murmured, and Jack wondered if he was even aware of what he was saying.

"Stand up for me," Jack said, "and walk around a little."

The man did so, and soon he was walking normally. Jack watched for a minute and sighed with relief. It appeared that the pill had done its magic. He already looked like his balance was shifting.

"That's good," Jack said, "you're fine."

Immediately Jeffery flopped back into the chair.

Jack turned away and busied himself by washing his hands, cleaning the blood out from under his nails.

"I know you from somewhere," Jeffery said, "I've seen you before."

"Yes," Jack said, "you have. You stabbed me. It broke my sternum."

"Sorry."

"It was one hell of a punch coming from a 12 year old. I'm curious to see what you can do now."

Jeffery blinked his eyes open and looked up at him, "You mean I didn't hallucinate that?"

"What? Me dragging you out of that house?"

"That was you?!" Jeffery was on his feet.

Jack turned to look at him, "It was me."

The stupid kid threw a punch which Jack didn't attempt to block. He just swayed right and let it go swinging past him. The force of it cracked the wooden cupboard.

"You took me away!" Jeffery snarled, "what if they were still alive?" He tried to pull back, but Jack caught his wrist and held it so he couldn't wind up for another blow.

"They weren't alive," Jack said, as calmly as he could while holding the man still. Jeffery was strong, almost too strong for Jack to hold. "Believe me, if they were I would have done something."

Jeff stopped struggling, and his head fell forwards so that the black hair hid his face. His body shook with a sob.

Jack dropped his wrist and fought the urge to step away, to the side, to distance himself. A reflexive urge, from the Butcher, from other people. Instead he pulled the creature in close and rocked him side to side.

He could tell, from the touch, that this was the first close contact Jeffery had experienced for months, if not years. The man's body didn't know how to respond any more than Jack's did, and somehow that made it easier to bear.

One of the Proxies came back into the house.

"I said out," Jack repeated. He took a knife from the counter behind him and flicked it at the man. It missed his head by two inches, and the man was back out the door.

"Why did you make me leave the house?" Jeff asked.

Jack sighed, "because I didn't want the police finding you, not like that. If would have been bad. I was trying to take you somewhere safe."

"But instead I stabbed you."

"You were only half-changed. You didn't really know what you were doing."

Jeff stepped away from him, back to the chair. He looked so much more relaxed, some of the weight had been lifted from him.

"Odd," Jack thought, "I carry so much weight I didn't even notice I was taking his too." Maybe that was why the Butcher had been unable to help him. The creature couldn't bear the weight of Jack's burden any more than Jack could. Instead, it had left Jack to carry his own weight and it had nearly crushed him. "I won't make the same mistake."

"They were dead?" Jeff asked again, "all three of them?"

Jack nodded.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." It was best not to share the details.

"I couldn't even tell. I was so out of it," Jeff closed his eyes again, "this is the first time in years I haven't seen...things."

Jack understood then. Some kind of psychosis, partly because of the botched changing, partly brought on by stress and genetics. Trying to give it a name now would be useless. "Is it gone now?" _Is that what you gave?_

Jeff nodded, "Most of it, I guess. They said it wouldn't be perfect."

Jack didn't need to ask, so he didn't. It was better not to say those names out loud. "Come on," he said instead, "there are rooms you can sleep in upstairs."

Jeff followed him. He was obviously tired now. Some of the weight had been lifted from him, and it had made him realize just how heavy he had been before.

Jack chose the room with the large bed, because he figured the man would toss and turn as he slept, and he didn't want him falling off. He waited until Jeff was settled, and again it was obvious to him that this was the first time the man had been been shown some hospitality in a long time. He found himself smiling a little as he watched.

Jack moved to close the door.

"Wait," Jeff said, and Jack paused. "Maybe… could you stay?"

Jack decided to draw the line. In all other things, he would be nearby. If there were nightmares, he would be at hand, if Jeff wanted food he would find it, if he wanted to talk, Jack would be ready. Hell, if he wanted a bedtime story, Jack would oblige, but this was a place he would not allow himself to step.

"No," Jack said, "it's too dangerous for me to be around someone asleep."

"Oh,"

"If you need me, yell," Jack said, "I'll hear you." He closed the door. He stood on the other side of it for a long time, listening to the breathing on the other side of it slow. When Jeff was asleep, he went back downstairs.

The Proxies were back, much quieter than they had been before.

"What was that?" One of them asked him as he approached.

"Something new," Jack said, "you should probably stay away from it."

They all swallowed nervously.

Jack started digging through the drawers in the kitchen. He knew what he wanted was here, somewhere. "He's asleep now."

"Why are you with him?"

Jack found what he was looking for. "That's how it works. When something new comes along, one of us steps in and protects it, teaches it. Something did it for me, and now I'm doing it for someone else."

One of the Proxies wrote that down. Jack didn't really care what they took back about him. He owed it to the Proxies to be friendly, no matter how much he hated them.

* * *

Spain belonged to Franco, Jack had forgotten that. He remembered only after hopping off of the train that had taken him into the country, where there was still a little propaganda on the walls of the station.

He immediately turned around and bought another ticket, this time for Portugal. At that point, his only goal was to get as far away from the Soviet Union as possible, and he really didn't want to deal with another dictator.

It was on the train to Portugal he heard the first rumors. There were two men in the seats beside him who apparently shipped goods to the Americas, and they were talking.

At that point, Jack was building up quite the repertoire of European languages, and he could translate from Spanish to Portuguese easily enough.

"Expand into Argentina?" One of the men was saying, "not gonna happen. The boss can try all he wants, but Brazil is enough hassle as it is."

"Hey, it's just the word on the street, don't snap at me."

"You know how many German refugees where are in Argentina? Thousands. These aren't privates either. These guys were high up the chain."

"That's what I told the guy who told me."

"They say Mengele's there, in Argentina. We do not want to open that can of worms."

At this point, Jack was openingly listening to the conversation.

"Mengele? Oh please. He jumped into a river the second they found Auschwitz and floated out to sea."

"A guy like that wouldn't do such a thing. No, he ran to South America like the rest of the cowards and left us here to clean up the mess."

"Well good luck to whoever is chasing him. They'll never find him in a place like that."

"Amen."

Jack could find him.

"How would someone go about getting there in the first place?" Jack asked the men in Spanish

They turned to look at him. One asked, "No hablas Portugués?"

"No, lo siento, pero cuando se habla yo entiendo la mayoría."

He nodded, but continued in Spanish, "Most people will go to Brazil first, or the French Indies, and get a boat from there. Those are where the big ports are. From there it's only a week or so to get to Argentina by ship."

By boat? That would be tough. Managing his appetite would be hard. There would be preparation involved.

"I see, thank you for the advice." Jack said.

"Why do you ask, stranger?"

"My girlfriend wants to go someday. I figured it would be a good honeymoon." He shot them a quick grin.

"Congratulations," One of the men said.

Jack lost the smile, "Oh no, no. She hasn't said yes yet. There's still a ways to go. I have to get the ring still."

"Ah, I see,"

Luckily for Jack, it was at that point that the man's partner reengaged him in conversation.

The rest of the journey was passed in silence.

By the end of the week, Jack was on a boat to Brazil. The time in between was spent collecting organs, mostly liver.

* * *

Jeff the Killer spent two nightmare-free weeks with the man called Eyeless Jack, but on the 15th day he woke up screaming at about 2 in the afternoon.

Jack was there in less than 10 seconds, kneeling by the side of the bed. He didn't try to speak or touch the man. He hummed a lullaby that he had learned in the confines of the train car more than 60 years before. As Jeff stilled and quieted he sang the words using the soft language he didn't know the meaning of. It still had the power to calm him and it worked its magic on Jeff too.

After a few minutes and several verses the man raised his head to look at Jack, "What is that?"

Jack stopped singing, "A lullaby."

"What language?"

Jack bit his tongue and shrugged. Jeff wouldn't stop staring at him, and after a moment he said, "I don't know." That was the honest answer. It certainly wasn't Polish.

Jeff nodded. He wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his chin on them, "I don't want to sleep anymore."

Jack didn't reply. He started humming again. One gentle hand reached out and stroked Jeff's hair. It was a fond touch, more than anything, familiar and easy. The man tensed under it, then relaxed again.

"It's okay if you don't want to sleep," Jack said.

Jeff nodded. All his muscles were loosening. The stress was going out of him. Jack still had a little bit of magic in him too.

"It was my parents," Jeff started, "they were right there in front of me, and dad was stabbed in the neck and mom's stomach was all torn up."

The boy had seen the bodies after all.

"They kept telling me things," Jeff said, "about things in the dark, shaped like dogs except they weren't dogs at all, and about a man who was made of shadows," he laughed then, a bitter raucous noise, "mom's guts were all over the floor, like mine were when you found me, but she didn't seem to care…"

Jack listened while he described it all. He noted the dogs and the shadow man, but most of the rest was gibberish. Finally, Jeff stopped talking. He was panting.

"Did you do this too?" he asked, "have nightmares?"

Jack looked away, "I try not to sleep."

Jeff didn't respond to that.

"I was on my own for a long time," Jack explained, "a little less than eight years. I barely ever slept in that time, and I did my best not to think about what I'd seen and done. It was better that way."

"But after you had a teacher?"

Jack smiled, "The nightmares hit me, ya. It was bad. I used to wake up screaming three times a night."

"What happened?"

"I dealt with it. It got better."

"But you don't sleep."

Jack shrugged, "My dreams are almost as bad as the nightmares, just with a lot fewer loud noises."

"And your teacher?"

Jack shook his head, "It's not very good at comforting people."

Jeff went silent then. He rocked back and forth, his arms still around his knees. "Are you sure you can't stay here?"

Jack sighed, "I'm sure. It's too risky. If I somehow lost control, you'd be in pieces."

By then, Jeff knew what he meant. He had seen Jack take organs from the corpses of his victims, and he had put two and two together with how Jack never ate normal food. He usually accepted this excuse. Today he wasn't having it.

"Just until I fall asleep," he insisted.

Jack looked at him. There was really no way the lack of control argument would hold up under scrutiny. He had heaps of self control. He could starve himself for months before he lost control. He was going to have to come up with another excuse for not providing this comfort.

He looked away from Jeff, like he was thinking about it. He scrabbled for an excuse, a better one, something more airtight. There wasn't one besides the truth, which was that he didn't trust himself enough not to tell the truth, if he somehow ended up comfortable and warm and wrapped up around this creature.

There was the sound of a door opening from the hallway. Jack seized on that, snapping his head towards it.

"Stay here," He said to Jeff, and stood up. He grabbed a flashlight and a scalpel from his bag before going out into the hallway.

Jeff, typically, followed him, but stayed in the room, his knife held in his right hand.

Jack stepped out into the hall and looked right and left. There wasn't anyone in sight, but he could sense the presence of something nearby. It was familiar, distantly. He had the vague memory of sensations, unpleasant ones. He swallowed bile and forced his hands to stop shaking.

He pushed open the door to the bedroom beside Jeff's. The creature completely covered in fabric was waiting for him, sitting back on the bed with the things that are supposedly its legs crossed.

"Well, hello, darling," the thing purred, "fancy finding you here."

Jack flicked on the lightswitch. He didn't say anything. Just hearing the voice was bringing back all kinds of memories he had suppressed.

"You've got something new," the creature said, "I can sense him, you know. The new ones are my favorite, just like you were."

This thing wanted Jeff?

"Maybe we can...work something out. Your old mentor and I had a deal, you see. It gave me you for two hours, I left it alone. Surely we can do something similar."

Jack was shaking again, but this time it was with anger. He suppressed it with some difficulty. He wouldn't be begging for mercy, it was a waste of time, and logic in the face of something like this was useless. He wished that he had a rifle.

"Well?"

Whatever happened, this thing was not getting its hands on Jeff.

"Why would you want him?" Jack said, approaching the creature. He had a hand in his jacket pocket, gripping the flashlight. "As I remember it, you enjoyed my company plenty."

"A little hobby of mine," the creature purred, "collecting the freshly-made. They're the sweetest."

Jack walked right up to the bed, "You don't prefer experience? I wasn't exactly brand new. About 15 years between the bomb and you showing up."

The creature eyed him. "Are you not afraid of me?" it asked.

"What's there to be afraid of?" Jack glanced over its form. Why it wasn't running or attacking it he didn't know. Maybe its senses were dulled by Jeff's presence.

"Many things that you know about and many more you don't."

Jack smiled, "I've seen worse and done worse, shadow man." He reached down, grabbed a handful of the cloth, and tore it away from the creature.

The thing on the bed screamed in pain at the light from the lamp hit the stuff beneath the cloth, and then it shrieked at the top of its lungs because Jack had turned the beam of the flashlight on it. It leapt up into the air, but Jack still had a handful of the cloth, so it came right back down with a crash. It writhed and rolled and unwittingly loosened the bindings even more, until the light from the flashlight and lamp bathed nearly every inch of the stuff that it tried to pass off as flesh.

Jack watched it spasm. He didn't think this would kill it. No, definitely not, but it would stay very far away from him for the rest of its time. Jeff too, probably.

Finally the thing had enough. It abandoned the cloth wrappings and leapt for a closed window, all loosy-held black flesh and shapeless limbs.

Jack followed its progress across the room with his flashlight. It landed on the edge of the window, no longer even looking human.

It turned and snarled at him, "I'll be back for the boy."

Jack snapped. He took a couple quick steps forward, grabbed the thing around what used to be an ankle, and flipped it over his head and onto the floor with a crunch. It made a sound that was almost a whimper.

Jack repositioned the flashlight, turned it off. He knelt, put one knee into the things stomach. He felt a startling calm, almost passive.

"What the hell is-?" The thing choked off as Jack positioned the flashlight. The things that had been masquerading as eyes went wide.

Jack switched languages, "I told you," he said in German, "I've done much worse than you." He jammed the flashlight hard into the thing, and it cried out even before he turned it on.

Later, he would tell Jeff that the thing had died almost immediately. It wasn't true. It laid there for 20 minutes, immobilized by pain, as the light burned through its insides. Jack sat by and watched it until he was sure it was at least temporarily dead. Then he got up and got a garbage bag, which he loaded up with the cloth and the thing's twitching body.

He took it outside and threw it into the dumpster in the alley, then returned to the safe house.

Jeff was in his room, but the expression on his face told Jack he had seen at least part of what had occurred.

Jack angled his head at him, "Are you scared of me yet?"

Jeff shook his head mutely.

"You should be. Go back to bed."

Jack turned away. A hand landed on his arm and held on. When he looked back, there was something new in Jeff's face. Up until then, Jack had figured that the man was obeying him out of necessity, simple calculation: "I am weak, but Jack is strong, so I'll watch him and get stronger." The look changed that. There was genuine concern in Jeff's face.

"Do you want to talk about what you just did?" He asked.

Jack blinked at him from behind the bandages. He took a breath and said, "Yes."

They ended up talking downstairs, Jeff still sleepy but aware enough not to fall asleep. He started drinking because, among other things, this was a Proxy-house and there was alcohol available. For Jeff, alcohol was a control mechanism. It kept him sane, but he didn't become intoxicated when he didn't want to.

Jack outlined for him exactly what the thing in the cloth was and why it had come after them. Jeff listened closely, asked a couple questions. Jack did his best to answer.

Finally, Jeff asked, "So, why did you put the flashlight… you know?"

Jack shrugged, "It seemed fitting, and it was guaranteed to be painful and effective."

"Fitting?"

Jack made a face, "I really don't know that much about it, but it made a habit of visiting newly-made creatures and...the phrase it used was 'borrowing them.' Not for long, a couple hours."

He saw Jeff make the connection, his posture stiffen. "It was here for me?"

"That's what it said."

The man went quiet. He took a drink, wiped foam from his upper lip. "It did this to you?" Jeff asked.

Jack's mind spun back in time and he shuddered. "Yes."

They didn't say anything else, but before it was 5 in the afternoon, Jeff was back in bed and sleeping.

Jack was sitting at the kitchen table still, a warm wet rag in his hand. He was rubbing at the inside of his left arm, stripping off the triangle. He had finally convinced himself there was nothing wrong with him.

* * *

As it turned out, the man calling himself Jack never made it to Argentina. The crossing from the Atlantic took a few days longer than he had expected it to, and he ran out of food. He had gone without food before, for much longer, but that had been in Russia or in the country, places where no one was nearby. Being on a crowded ship was hell in comparison, and not only for that reason. Jack had never liked large groups of people, and now he found himself looking over his shoulder for enemy combatants all the time, and seeing them everywhere in crowds. Loud noises- the ship's horn, a crate crashing onto the deck, the people in the next cabin screaming- only reminded him of machine gun fire. It just wasn't right, none of it was. It was all off-color. He couldn't relax, not for ten longs days and nights.

Then the ship docked. Jack was one of the first people off, and he wasted no time in getting as far away from the crowds as possible. There was an immigration station, but he ignored it. He didn't have time to mess around with customs officials.

Jack bypassed the station by taking a long round-about route through the port that ended with him climbing over a stack of cargo boxes and hopping a fence. The alleyway he was in was boxed in on either side by warehouses, and the closed space made him nervous so he darted out of it.

And was promptly hit over the head with a wooden bat. Despite everything, his brain was still susceptible to blunt force trauma, so he lost consciousness.

He woke up three hours later with his equivalent of a pounding headache inside of a wooden crate.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" A male voice was saying in Portuguese, muffled by the wood.

"Of course it is. He matches the description. 'Male, between 20 and 25 years of age, brown hair, eyes covered, et cetera, et cetera.'"

"And her?"

"She's about right. Best we could do with the budget."

"Well, no use worrying about it now. Ship them off."

Jack felt his crate being lifted and set down, then an engine rumbled to life somewhere below him and again he was moving.

From somewhere to his left a woman started to cry.

Jack hummed for a while, then he sang, a low sad song that he didn't understand the words to, and when he grew tired of that, he got comfortable. The crate was large enough for him to roll over in, and it was half-full of soft straw. He snuggled down into it and got as comfortable as he could. The sun hitting the crate was making it warm. It was the warmest he could remember being in a long time, and it was making him feel sleepy. In no time at all, and for the first time in nearly eight years, he was asleep.

The journey lasted for probably about a week. Jack grew restless, hungry, annoyed, but when he was finally delivered to the place he was going, and the lid was lifted off the crate, he felt a profound calm wash over him.

Over the course of the next several decades, Jack slowly came to understand that the clam reaction was not his personality: it was a biological thing. One monster was driven to protect and guide another, and the one who was protected and guided wanted only to stay with their protector for as long as possible. Or until said protector did something unforgivable.

Jack was looking up at a thing that wasn't quite human. It had extra limbs and golden cat eyes.

"THEY'VE BROUGHT ME A CHANGELING," The Butcher said, but Jack didn't understand then "I CAN'T SAY I'M SURPRISED."

Jack sat up, the ropes around his wrists long since broken, and just looked at the thing in front of him.

The creature produced a pad of paper, and scribbled something. It turned the page around to face him.

Jack shook his head. "I don't understand," He started scrolling through languages, "Deutsch? Français?

Español? Português?"

It scribbled again, for a long time. When it turned them around, the same phrase was repeated in all four languages, "All of them." Below that there was one phrase in German, "You're going to have to learn English."

Jack looked up at it. That calm feeling was making it impossible to panic or attack.

The Butcher scribbled again, "Tell me about yourself."

Jack shook his head.

"Very well. You will have to eventually."

He nodded, "I'm hungry. I need to eat."

Scribbling a moment, "What do you want?"

Jack pointed at the other wooden crate, the one that the crying was coming from.

The Butcher paused, as if surprised, then it wrote, "Very well, but we will have to come up with a way to split them in the future."

As Jack got to his feet, shaking a little from being still for so long, he felt like he was really safe for the first time in years. Already that feeling of safety was making him remember and consider things that he didn't want to. It was going to be a long difficult road back to normal.

* * *

The sound disturbed Jack's train of thought. He was sitting with his back to the wall beside the bedroom. Inside the room, he could hear the sound of Jeff doing his work. It was quieter than usual, which wasn't a good sign. Usually Jeff laughed like a maniac, and when he was silent, it meant he was too close to slipping to enjoy the ritual. It also meant that the kid would ask him to stay in the room when he went to sleep later. That was a serious problem.

The sound was the door opening downstairs. It caught his attention immediately. He stood and tapped on the door. He knocked in a specific pattern, and the sounds on the other side stopped. Then there was a harsh broken scream, a curse in Jeff's gravely voice, and a gurgle that cut off after a second.

Jack winced. That was that. He walked to the stairs and leaned over the upper railing. He hoped they hadn't sent anyone that would make him feel guilty about this.

The first head appeared downstairs, looking upwards at too shallow of an angle to see him at the banister. It was a man that was fast approaching middle age. Behind him came another man, maybe ten years his junior. They were both carrying guns held at shoulder height.

Jack thought about the best way to do this. He didn't want them upstairs where a stray bullet could hit Jeffery. He didn't want them to fire any shots at all. After a moment, he sighed and took a single scalpel out of his pack. He braced one hand on the banister of the stairs and vaulted over it.

The landing was a hard one. He almost missed it. His toes just barely landed on the step of the stairs he was aiming for, and he was forced to put a tremendous force into throwing himself forward rather than trying to conceal his presence.

Still, he was on the younger man in a moment, trying not to resort to the scalpel if he could help it. He grabbed the hand that was holding the gun as it swung towards him and used it as a lever to flip the man down the ten steps beneath him. He went down with a shout that was cut off when his head cracked off the wooden panelling.

Jack swayed a moment before regaining his balance. He looked up at the second intruder, his head tilting quizzically to the side as he saw the gun levelled at his head.

"I've never come across someone who hesitated to shoot when their friend was being hurt," he said.

The man shivered at the sound of his voice, as everyone did. He started to say something, but Jack was already moving before his lips even parted. He reached out and grabbed the man's throat, squeezing tight enough to make his breath come in wheezes. He lifted and turned and slammed the man against the wall hard enough to knock him out and crack his ribs.

"That's for being a coward," he told him softly, "pull the trigger next time." He dropped the body.

And that was when the bullet slammed through his own ribs and chest and buried itself deep into the wood of the stairs.

Jack had never forgotten the feeling of a bullet passing through him: the heat of it, the friction, the sudden reminder that the human body has nerve endings on the inside. It wasn't easy to dismiss from his mind.

He turned, one hand going to the exit wound in his stomach out of shock, and saw the first man was conscious and bleeding. His gun was still pointed at Jack.

He pulled the trigger again, and the bullet his ribs and shredded through one of his lungs. Jack felt the bubble of air expand in his chest and then whoosh out of the hole in his back along with the bullet. The heat of it almost seared his insides.

He walked down the rest of the stairs, not hurrying, and made his way to where the man was lying. His legs were twisted like they were broken and one of his arms was clutched to his chest.

Jack kicked him in the head, knocking him out for good this time.

"Jack?" Came a timid voice from the stairs.

Jack turned, both his hands pressed to his chest now. Jeffery, spattered with the blood of his kill, was looking down at him. It surprised Jack that such a rough voice could sound so small and scared.

He opened his mouth to offer some small amount of comfort and instead felt fluid bubbling up his windpipe and into his mouth. He closed his lips against it, then turned his head and spat blood.

"You've been shot," Jeff said with growing horror.

Jack nodded.

The man came down the stairs, stepping over the two unconscious bodies. He looked at Jack, and for the second time Jack saw concern in those dark eyes.

"What's wrong?" Jeff asked.

Jack walked past him up the stairs and retrieved his pack. He carried it back down and opened the zipper to retrieve his notebook. He flipped past the sketches and drawings to a blank page and wrote, "My lung is ruptured. I can't talk." He turned the paper to show it to Jeff.

The man swallowed, "Oh."

Jack wrote again, in shaking scrawled letters, "I'm going to stop the bleeding." He showed it to Jeff then wrote, "My ribs are splintered too. It's bad. I need to see the Butcher."

"Who's the Butcher?" Jeff asked.

Jack simply shook his head. Instead of a reply, he wrote, "I'll tell you on the way. You'll have to help me tape up the holes in my back first."

Jeff nodded and dutifully stood to the side as Jack removed his bloody clothing and exposed his torso. It was bad enough that the man's eyes widen slightly at the sight. Still, he did as Jack instructed, interpreting hand gestures as instructions as he stopped the bleeding from the holes in Jack's back.

"You're right," he said as he was fixing the second bullet wound, "your ribs are shot to hell."

Jack laughed even though it brought blood to his lips.

"Is the Butcher like that shadow thing?" Jeff asked after a few minutes.

Jack shook his head. He wrote in the notebook, "The Butcher and I are old friends." A lie. A small one.

He felt Jeff relax behind him at the confirmation, finishing his task with the bullet wound.

He really wished he didn't have to do this. Bringing Jeff to the place he had spend ten years of his life, and such a dark time in his life, was just asking for trouble. He had not told the boy about himself,not the truth anyway. He had told that little white lie: "I was in a war. My Name was Jamie. I don't remember much more than that." If Jeff found out where he was really from, he didn't know how the man would react.


End file.
